Gloom

You know those days when you feel down and all you want is to make other people suffer? Well now you can have that with Gloom. This is one of those games that the game group picked up because of Table Top and I know I was super thankful we did.

In Gloom you select a family that you will weave into a story using cards. The story is of suffering and… well gloom which eventually ends in their deaths. The goal is to have the most miserable family. The game ends when one player finally kills off their entire family. *note this is an imaginary family*

Play progresses by each player laying down a card and telling a story as to why/how this event happened to the character. There are positive and negative modifiers on a characters mood. You want more negative modifiers on your own characters and more positive on your opponents. So a characters life could progress something like this. Mister giggles was “mocked by midgets” because of his silly name, but “found fame at a feast” (opponent play) due to his happy giggly nature, but at this feast he was “sickened by salmon” after he “found maggots in the meat”, and later that maggoty salmon caused him to be "distressed by dysentery," and eventually died from being “consumed from within” by those maggots in the meat.

The story can go as simply as that or can be more elaborate. The better the group is at story telling the more fun and darkly hilarious the game becomes. What effort you invest in the story comes back in some unexpected ways. I found that when I play Gloom I really don’t care who wins at the end. I just have a blast listening to my friends being so creative in the interweaving of the story.

The downsides to Gloom come from the basic deck having such a limited supply of cards. I highly recommend looking in to the expansions to allow for a greater variety in the story cards. Otherwise the basic game starts to get formulaic and repetitive. Also make sure you play this game with people who are in the mood and capable of spinning a story. I’ve played with some people who really weren’t into the mechanic or weren’t in the mood and it just killed the fun for the rest of the table. With the right group the game flows and is dynamic.

So to sum up get Gloom if you have a creative gaming group with a slightly dark streak in them, the story telling will have you dieing of laughter. This game is an excellent way to get some Gloom out of your system.